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It’s been almost three decades since the last television set was manufactured in Canada. Electrohome finally gave in to competition from the Japanese in 1984 and shut down production here.

Televisions went the way of the entire consumer electronics industry in North America. We got cheaper televisions — they cost far less today in real terms than they did when I bought my first colour TV, a Sony, in the mid-80s — but the people who used to make them had to find something else to do.

Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s about when, adjusted for inflation, wages of Canadian workers stopped rising after years of sustained growth.

A study last year by Statistics Canada found that between 1981 and 2011, the median hourly wage increased by only about 10 per cent — a meagre one third of a per cent per year.

So that’s been the trade-off for Canadians in the era of globalization; cheaper stuff that we can no longer afford to make, industries in which we can no longer compete and continual downward pressure on wages in return for access to foreign markets for the export industries that are still in the game.

That’s the real context for the story that broke on the weekend about the Royal Bank of Canada replacing 45 of its employees with temporary foreign workers.

As first told, it appeared to be a story about Canadians losing their jobs to workers being brought in under the federal temporary foreign workers program.

That program has been under fire because of its rapid expansion over the past decade — to a record of just over 338,000 in December — and because of the dispute over bringing in Chinese miners to open an underground coal mine in B.C.

As clarified by RBC, the facts at play are these: There were foreign workers in RBC branches and Canadians are being displaced, but it is a case of outsourcing, not bringing in foreign workers to take the jobs held by Canadians.

The foreign workers were brought in by the company to which the work was being outsourced, iGate Corp, to learn the specific requirements of the jobs they would be doing when they returned home.

Not surprisingly, the Canadians who were watching their replacements being trained to take over their jobs were upset.

So too were thousands of Canadians who heard about the situation, many of whom told reporters they were closing their accounts with the bank.

Most people would agree that it would be outrageous if a bank were bringing in foreign workers, especially if — as they are allowed to do under the temporary foreign workers program — it was paying them up to 15 per cent less than the Canadians they were displacing.

But that isn’t happening. The bank isn’t bringing in foreign workers with all of the issues that implies; it’s shipping work out of the country in an effort to cut costs and boost profits.

For the workers involved, the real explanation makes no difference. In fact, the same forces are at play. Temporary foreign workers who come to Canada are the face of the same pool of cheap labour that we compete with for the production of goods, and increasingly, services.

RBC, like thousands of other businesses in Canada, is outsourcing work that has been performed here because of the competitive pressure to do so.

They do it because the accepted wisdom of globalization is that if we can achieve lower costs, we must — regardless of the effect on our community, our neighbours and our families. Otherwise, we can’t compete and like Electrohome, we will fall victim to those that can.

It’s not just a decision made by businesses. Consumers have shown that price matters more than place. Every time we buy a cheap TV, a set of stainless steel pots or running shoes from a low-wage country, as individuals we are as guilty as the largest corporations of taking jobs from Canadians.

For most of us, it’s not a conscious decision, just as we aren’t consciously trying to elbow out smaller Canadian retailers when we shop at Costco or cross the border to buy cheaper groceries.

But one piece inevitably goes with the other. As long as we want the benefits of cheaper production, we have to face the competition it represents.

And that Japanese competition? Two years ago, Sony and Panasonic conceded that they were losing the battle for market share to emerging manufacturing counties with lower costs.

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Craig McInnes: Foreign workers are a threat to Canadian jobs, wherever they live

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